PPA Petitions Obama, Treasury Secretary

October 14, 2009 (CAP Newswire) – The Poker Players Alliance (PPA), a poker advocacy group that regularly involves itself in legislative and legal issues in the U.S., is raising the stakes this autumn in an attempt to help delay the further implementation of the nation’s UIGEA laws, scheduled to go into wider effect on December 1.

Most ambitious of these efforts is an appeal to its members to send a special letter to U.S. President (and admitted poker player) Barack Obama.

Currently posted at the PPA’s website, the letter directly addresses President Obama and asks him to help protect citizens’ right to play poker on the Internet without government interference.

“Please respond to this letter and let me know you will support my freedoms. I hope that I, along with my over one million fellow Poker Players Alliance members, can count on your support,” the letter states in part, per Bluff Europe.

It also addresses the recent (and continuing) string of Internet poker asset seizures by the U.S. Justice Department: “As a voter and a poker player, I am writing to ask you to oppose seizures of poker players' funds by the Justice Department. … I do not believe any Federal law restricts my right to play poker online and I believe poker players are being unfairly and improperly targeted in these actions.”

The letter comes just after the PPA filed a petition with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to delay the UIGEA. Some legislators in the U.S. Congress are also working towards this goal, but with little progress or hope for success before the December 1 deadline.

The petition addresses the most common grievance against the UIGEA, that it would place “an unreasonable burden on regulators and the financial services industry at a time of economic crisis.” This is expected to strike a note during a time of financial hardship in the U.S. and abroad. (Although in other cases, it has had surprisingly little effect to date.) Read more here.